Last fall, the fashion press — yours truly included — received a memo from Chanel politely informing us to mind our Ps and interlocking Cs in future editorial copy. “A note of information and entreaty to fashion editors, advertisers, copywriters and other well-intentioned mis-users of our Chanel name. ... Although our style is justly famous, a jacket is not ‘a Chanel jacket’ unless it is ours, and somebody else’s cardigans are not ‘Chanel for now.’ And even if we are flattered by such tributes to our fame as ‘Chanel-issime, Chanel-ed, Chanels, and Chanel-ized,’ PLEASE DON’T. Our lawyers positively detest them. We take our trademark seriously.”

This means that I can’t tell you about a new label called MSGM, out of northern Italy, on display at Holt Renfrew’s fall preview on Monday and which Vogue Italia has dubbed one to watch by likening its exuberant tweed and bouclé jackets trimmed in chain to a certain established French brand. Or that its neon and fur and leather trims are in fact cooler than that French brand. I can’t do that.

Chanel is merely protecting the cachet of its brand heavily promoted in advertising and marketing, and its trademark name — the latter an important distinction from its signature look — from being devalued in adjectival use by association with aspiring arrivistes. That’s fair enough, and that’s the only thing they can do — Chanel can’t prevent anyone from designing similarly boxy tweed jackets trimmed in anything, anywhere.

At Holt’s, I walked past a display of quilted Michael Kors handbags in an array of colours, each with convertible double-length chain interwoven with matching leather. It’s a 2.55 by another name — the iconic Chanel bag with a different logo, as far as I could see, pretty much what Mademoiselle designed and launched back in February 1955. Kors — and Coach, and Roots — are now also doing the little brass name plate thing that Marc Jacobs popularized years ago on handbags. J’accuse! The trail of bread crumbs is endless.

Like so many other affordable mainstream brands, shoe label Jeffrey Campbell’s stock in trade is heavily inspired by runway designer confections at least quadruple the price. Lancôme artistic director Aaron De Mey decides that lavender eyeshadows are the hue of the season and CoverGirl comes up with similar shades. Is that copying or zeitgeist-catching?

Marcus Boon argues that such copying is an essential part of being human in his recent book, In Praise of Copying. Boon, an associate professor of English literature at York University in Toronto, delves into intellectual property’s Platonic legal ontology, as well as the Buddhist idea of essencelessness.

“IP law’s three constituent parts — copyright, trademark and patent law — are each built around the paradox that you cannot protect an idea itself, but can protect only a fixed, material expression of an idea,” Boon explains.

I’ll spare you the details and just ask, when is original original? The U.S. Congress can’t agree — and seems unwilling to police brands and designers: The latest versions and amendments to the proposed Design Piracy Prohibition Act have been tabled there since 2007. The only thing protected, at present, in Canada or the United States in fashion design is the textile pattern or print, if it’s original and has been registered.

I’ve been thinking about this IP issue a lot in the two years since I discovered that Diane von Furstenberg’s brand had copied, stitch for stitch, the design of a jacket by Canadian niche label Mercy (the former properly acknowledged this and provided undisclosed financial compensation for having done so).

This spring, designers of label Proenza Schouler were chagrined and “disappointed,” as they told The New York Times, to discover that Target brand Mossimo had an uncanny version of their buzzy status PS1 handbag in store — same slouchy shape, front flap and double-strap satchel type details, minus the sumptuous leather material. You might try and make the case that if a person can have the look for $40, they aren’t going to spend $1,600 on the original. But can a distinct slouch be original? I’m not talking about duplicate pretenders and replicas. (Let’s not confuse the issue with counterfeiting — fake impersonators trying to pass themselves as the trade dress of real, trademarked brands are a different matter entirely.)

When Thierry Mugler’s gourmand Angel perfume became a game-changer, others flocked to create similar scents. We’re in an open source world where niche perfumers often freely share the list of ingredients and even exact formulas, knowing that amateurs and knock-off shops can’t afford the ingredients so the object, the scent, won’t be the same. We wouldn’t have Sunset Boulevard without David Lean’s version of Great Expectations — the Miss Havisham in that film provided direct inspiration for Gloria Swanson’s sad character created two years later.

Great minds think alike — or sometimes one does, on purpose.

• In Praise of Copying ($25.95) is available from Harvard University Press.

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